http://www.lenholgate.com/ Len Holgate's thoughts on this and that... Mainly test driven software development in C++ on Windows platforms... - Geek Speak en-us Len.Holgate@JetByte.com 2009-06-03T09:25:18+00:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000849.html Eric Lippert has an interesting blog posting (here) on how sometimes you can be so focused on fixing the bug you fail to step back and take a better look at the actual problem that you're trying to solve. I'm... Posted by Len at 09:25 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 849@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-06-03T09:25:18+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000846.html I've just spent a little too long trying to track down a bug in a mixed mode DLL that I'm building. The DLL exposes a set of entry point functions that are defined as taking a single pointer argument and... Posted by Len at 06:19 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 846@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-05-14T18:19:44+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000845.html I'm currently wrapping a server's client side API in an ATL COM object for a client. The COM object will be used to communicate with the server from managed code or VB or other COM compatible systems. It's a fairly... Posted by Len at 09:50 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 845@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-05-12T09:50:29+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000844.html Well, I've finally done something that I've been meaning to do for a long time. I've written some non-trivial assembly language code. Up until recently I wasn't expecting this to be embedded assembly, but it actually seems like a sensible... Posted by Len at 07:50 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 844@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-05-08T07:50:30+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000842.html I'm in the process of upgrading another client to v6.0. These guys write multi-user game systems and have a fairly complex CLR hosting custom application server. Anyway, I was hoping that we'd have a few easy performance wins from the... Posted by Len at 01:16 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Socket Servers ]]> 842@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-04-28T13:16:48+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000841.html Herb Sutter has just published an interesting article over at DDJ on correctly using thread pools: Use Thread Pools Correctly: Keep Tasks Short and Nonblocking. It's not rocket science and it doesn't deal with platform issues but it's a useful... Posted by Len at 08:48 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Socket Servers ]]> 841@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-04-21T08:48:50+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000828.html Something that I find myself wanting in a debugger from time to time are breakpoints that only fire if the code has been entered via a specific route. You know the problem, you've tracked a particular issue down to one... Posted by Len at 09:43 AM | Comments (1) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 828@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-01-22T09:43:42+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000827.html It's now around a month since I started shifting the bulk of my source code from CVS to Subversion. In that time I've move most of my internal use code, and a couple of clients. I've done several client releases... Posted by Len at 09:27 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 827@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-01-15T09:27:14+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000824.html Converting a numeric type to a string format in C++ is one of those problems that was 'solved' a long time ago. The 'standard' method usually involves streaming the type to be converted into a std::stringstream and then extracting the... Posted by Len at 09:17 PM | Comments (4) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 824@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-12-19T21:17:11+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000823.html The CVS to SVN code migration is going well. As recommended by a commenter I've switched from using a script to pull my tools libraries from their repository into the server framework examples build tree to using svn:externals. This works... Posted by Len at 09:40 AM | Comments (2) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 823@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-12-18T09:40:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000822.html I'm in the process of moving my source code from a CVS repository to Subversion. The main reason for the move is so that I can move the repository onto one of my NAS devices so that it can be... Posted by Len at 01:23 PM | Comments (10) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 822@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-12-11T13:23:27+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000819.html The move to the new hosting server is complete and all the perl config has been done so I've turned comments back on!... Posted by Len at 09:31 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 819@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-12-02T21:31:08+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000817.html I've just updated my installation of DevPartner Studio. I mainly use the C++ error detection part of this suite, that's the bit that used to be called BoundsChecker. Anyway, version 9.0 is the first version to support VS2008 and x64... Posted by Len at 07:23 AM | Comments (8) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 817@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-11-22T07:23:55+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000815.html I've been compiling with /W4 for some time now. I didn't realise that this wasn't the best you could get. There are some warnings which are not enabled by default and therefore aren't included in /W4. To enable these you... Posted by Len at 10:25 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 815@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-10-19T22:25:58+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000812.html I've been meaning to build STLPort for Visual Studio 2008 for some time now but as the STL support that ships with Visual Studio has been improved the urgency to be able to use an alternative has reduced. Unfortunately STLPort... Posted by Len at 11:06 AM | Comments (1) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 812@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-10-01T11:06:05+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000808.html I'm currently writing and testing a simple class that watches for system time changes. This is to allow an app to adjust some timers that it sets for absolute times in the future if the system time changes. The code's... Posted by Len at 06:05 PM | Comments (3) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 808@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-09-09T18:05:03+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000801.html There's an interesting article over on Dr. Dobb's about why writing lock free code is so hard. Herb Sutter takes some code from an article that Dr. Dobb's published a couple of months ago and pulls it apart and points... Posted by Len at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 801@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-08-06T12:06:50+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000793.html I stumbled on Gustavo Duarte's blog this week via this post about how lucky we are to be programmers. The post that led me to his blog is good stuff and has had lots of linkage this week. The rest... Posted by Len at 09:52 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 793@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-07-24T21:52:52+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000787.html Back in December and January I was working on the initial phases of a system to allow the development of custom Excel worksheet functions in managed code using the Excel XLL 'C' interface (Excel4v). Phase 1 finished with us having... Posted by Len at 08:55 AM | Comments (2) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 787@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-06-25T08:55:20+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000781.html I found JP's blog whilst googling for some information on RVA forwarders in PE files. There's lots of good stuff there about reasonably low level Windows development, debugging, testing and API hooking. Recommended if you like the kind of stuff... Posted by Len at 12:30 PM | Comments (1) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 781@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-05-06T12:30:51+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000780.html Back in October 2007 I sumarised my findings from getting my Win32 DebugAPI based debug engine working on x64. One of the strange things that I found at the time was this: When running a CLR app under the Win32... Posted by Len at 04:43 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak , Testing ]]> 780@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-05-01T16:43:42+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000778.html The endless torrent of bounce messages began again yesterday evening. Once again it was arount one email every 2 minutes or so. I turned on my laptop this morning expecting a few thousand emails to download and only a third... Posted by Len at 08:52 AM | Comments (2) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 778@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-04-24T08:52:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000775.html There's an entry over on the Dr. Dobbs blog about testing and how you make sure that your tests are testing the right thing; effectively, who tests the test. There's a question at the end "What do you do?" and... Posted by Len at 10:24 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Testing ]]> 775@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2008-04-15T22:24:52+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000774.html There's an interesting article over on the Dr. Dobbs Code Talk blog; PQR - A Simple Design Pattern for Multicore Enterprise Applications. It documents a design that I'm pretty familiar with and one which has worked pretty well for me... Posted by Len at 05:44 PM | Comments (6) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 774@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-04-14T17:44:36+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000772.html It seems I'm not the only one to make mistakes with GetTickCount() based timer code, see: System.Threading.Timer fires immediately when specifying a large value for due time.... Posted by Len at 07:05 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 772@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-04-07T19:05:03+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000770.html This morning a new Ready NAS NV+ unit arrived, so now I have three. I didn't have a sudden change of heart about buying a development box, the power supply in my office NAS died on Thursday afternoon and buying... Posted by Len at 08:53 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 770@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-03-22T08:53:27+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000769.html As I mentioned a while back I'm using a pair of ReadyNAS NV+ RAID systems as my on-site data store and off-site backup. These are both working well and I'm pleased with the solution. After a few hickups and delays... Posted by Len at 09:22 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 769@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-03-18T09:22:46+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000768.html Whilst I've been away I've had a bug report for the TDD timer queue code that's available here. The report is completely correct and could result in a timer being scheduled out of sequence if it's scheduled around the point... Posted by Len at 09:15 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 768@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-03-18T09:15:18+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000766.html An interesting piece here from Phil Haack about why they decided to use an abstract base class rather than an interface. Versioning is always a complicated thing for library designers. I know that I'm lucky in that I don't have... Posted by Len at 01:20 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 766@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-02-21T13:20:47+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000765.html For some time I've had a class which implements asynchronous file writing. It's the basis for a logging class that some of my clients use. The class builds on several of the classes used in my server framework and uses... Posted by Len at 09:51 AM | Comments (4) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 765@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-02-20T09:51:41+00:00